At long last, our winner. And seven very worthy runners-up. All of which are attainable and practical and make you love driving again. Plus, a chat with Elon Musk and a couple road trips.

The 2012 Esquire Car of the Year: 2013 Cadillac ATS

The 2012 Esquire Car of the Year: 2013 Cadillac ATS

One of the tropes in the car business is things run in cycles: If you're on the top today, you'll eventually be on the bottom. Consider, then, America's largest carmaker: General Motors. GM began life in 1908 as a small Michigan holding company; it's now the world's second-largest car manufacturer. Over the years, it's put out genuinely amazing machinery, utter garbage, and everything in between.

This is relevant, because Esquire'sCar of the Year isn't selected in a bubble. Like a lot of people, we look at the numbers — acceleration times, fuel mileage, sales potential — because those things matter. But above all, we focus on how a car makes us feel. The Esquire Car of the Year should be practical, but not at the expense of emotion. It should be sedate enough to ferry the boss to a meeting, yet soulful enough to get the juices pumping just sitting in the driveway. It's a gorgeous car you can buy for your commute, a back-road terror when it needs to be, a comfortable, spacious way to take the kids to swim practice. And because we live in America, there's also hometown pride. It doesn't dominate the proceedings, but we'd be lying if we didn't admit to feeling good when the winner comes from the same place we do.

Meet the newest Esquire Car of the Year: the 2013 Cadillac ATS. It is perhaps the single most important thing Detroit has built in years, and it is one hell of a car to boot. We're more than a little proud.

Consider Cadillac: GM's top-shelf brand, long struggling, once a genuine world leader. It's the carmaker that gave us the first electric starter, one of the first to offer workable electric lights, and the only American brand walking to have ever offered a standard V-16 — 16 whopping cylinders — all before World War II. Its slogan was once "the Standard of the World," and it wasn't just hype. But Cadillac wandered. The brand slowly morphed into just another badge in GM's portfolio; everything between the Carter administration and the first CTS sedan (2003) was either forgettable or aimed at comatose retirees. The GM bankruptcy, well, that needs no introduction. This from the only luxury-car brand America has left.

The turnaround began with the CTS. It was the first step, a well-crafted four-door that drove nicely and wanted for little. It evolved into the current CTS (an ass-kicker and leather-lined bargain) and 556-hp CTS-V (a thundering ass-kicker, with an engine stout enough to jump-start the sun). Suddenly Cadillac mattered again.

The rear-wheel-drive ATS, new this year, is the next step. The ads paint it as a sport sedan similar to the BMW 328i, a predictable move. The BMW is the industry benchmark, its iPhone, a product so pitch-perfect in ability that everyone uses it as a standard. The ATS's engineers have admitted that in the beginning they cribbed the BMW's measurements. (The two cars' wheelbases and lengths are all within 1.3 inches of each other.) But the BMW occasionally feels a little cold. It's German, after all.

Can the ATS hang with a 3 Series on winding pavement? Of course. Big deal. Those are numbers, and numbers are easy. Same for the optional 272-hp, 32-mpg, 2.0-liter turbo four-cylinder — it's a smart, razor-sharp engine that would've seemed impossible a decade ago — or the available 321-hp, 28-mpg V-6, a smooth piece that rips into the asphalt the moment you toe the throttle. Technical excellence is pretty common these days, and if you run a car company and hire the right engineers, you have to be trying hard to miss it.

Humanity is the last true automotive bellwether, and how the Cadillac trounced this year's other debuts. The base ATS is $33,990, but from the right angle, the body creases and brightwork touches make it seem worth ten grand more. The shape is sharp and clean and soft all at once, like a lab experiment built from stem cells and diamonds. It feels American, in the same way that the Willis (née Sears) Tower looks American — taut and clean but oddly human. Like our three previous Esquire Cars of the Year — the Audi A7, the Audi S4, and the Ford Taurus SHO — its appeal is visceral.

For a long time, there was this notion that American cars should be like cars from Europe, Japan, or anywhere with a history of reliability and decent engineering. This is bunk, and you don't realize it until you see the nationalism thing done right. You sit in the cockpit of the ATS and think, Well, yeah. It's the hint of big-industry swagger in the capacitive-touch center console (piano black, with a motorized oddment drawer), a futuristic, glossy thing that you find yourself endlessly skittering your fingers across. It's the touch-screen navigation and cockpit control system that works like a smartphone, pinching to zoom and redrawing without a glitch. (As Steve Jobs taught us, tech should just work.) It's the blisteringly cool chassis — you put the car on a lift, walk underneath it, and everything is weight-drilled this, welded-aluminum aerospace-science-fiction that. This is the kind of stuff you see in supercars, not midlevel sedans. Every inch of this thing, you get the feeling that the people who designed it gave a damn about Detroit and machines and America — the old America, the one that built things and conquered divides. You see the ATS in your driveway and you think about that, but mostly you just want to get on the road. There is no better compliment.

Fathers everywhere go hoarse repeating the maxim "It isn't the fall that matters, but what happens when you stand back up." With the ATS, Cadillac is moving again, no longer unsure of itself, a brand to be proud of. The country has an attainable luxury car again. And Esquire has its Car of the Year.

Domestic Car of the Year: 2013 Ford Focus ST

Domestic Car of the Year: 2013 Ford Focus ST

Think back to high school: Music needed to be louder, food needed more fat in it, and cars were interesting only if they were orange or yellow or polka-dot obnoxious. Most people grow saner as they get older (exception: fat tastes good forever), but everyone needs to go high-school-grade batshit occasionally. Ford's Focus ST is that batshit. The ST is an ordinary hatchback with a turbocharger, a stiffer suspension, and a silly amount of power. But it also has a front end that's like a bloated catfish. It comes in a color called Tangerine Scream, and the interior is an ADD explosion of glossy paint and alien shapes. The bratty sport seats have ST stitched on them in big red letters, just in case you forget. The exhaust is a thunderous din, a peace-disturbing boom-thump that trips car alarms in parking garages. A six-speed manual is the only transmission. The ride is jarring but somehow not annoying; the car gobbles up corners giddily, like a dog straining a leash. There is nothing subtle here, and it bends you toward obnoxious acts. Most carmakers don't have the balls to build a car this ridiculous, and the ones that do rarely sell them in America. It's a reminder that cars are gutsy, juvenile things at heart; deep down, the good ones speak to the sixteen-year-old you. You don't drive something like this by accident, but then that's kind of the point.